History

The song has a role in the plot of Raise Your Voice—in the Sean McNamara-directed film, which is set at a performing arts summer school, Terri (played by Duff) writes the song with her fellow student Jay (Oliver James) and performs it at the film's climax in front of the students, staff and parents. The performance scene served as the single's video, which premiered on the program rage on ABC Broadband in mid January 2005.

During the week of the single's radio release in Australia in January, it was the fifth most added song to station playlists. After its release as a single the following month, it peaked at number twenty-two on the ARIASingles Chart and remained in the top forty for nine weeks. The single's B-side is a cover of The Who's "My Generation".

According to Paul Broucek, executive vice president of music for New Line Cinema, in November 2004, "Someone's Watching over Me" was one of the studio's possible contenders for an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song at the 77th Academy Awards. The Herald Sun wrote of "Someone's Watching over Me", which it awarded one star, "Yeah, that'd be Lindsay Lohan. They're single-white-femaling each other when it comes to music, though Duff got in first with the polite Avril-lite soft rock. However, this positivity-laden ballad sucks. The Sunday Telegraph published a two-star review of the song, editorializing that "The banging migraine kicked in somewhere around the lyrics: "I've seen that ray of light/It's shining on my destiny" [...] a brainless, infectious dose of made-to-order teen empowerment pop.